Thursday, July 27, 2006

More of My Geekish Past.

There's a great piece over on ESPN's Page 2 in which their writers share they favorite baseball card memories, and solicit similar submissions from readers. (If you read it, be sure to check out the "Trip to the Topps Factory" sidebar as well.) Anyway, here's what I sent in (short and sweet, because of their 200-word limit):

There were a lot of memorable baseball cards from my childhood collecting days, but one in particular really illustrates my silly obsessiveness about collecting.

When I was 8, I came across half of a 1978 Topps Sparky Anderson card on the playground of my elementary school. Someone had apparently torn it in half, crumpled it up and threw it away. The fact that the card was now worthless meant nothing to me – in my eyes, it had plenty of value since it was one I didn’t have yet. So, I scoured the school grounds looking for the other half, only to come up empty. That didn’t deter me, though, as I proudly took home the left half of the card, taped it to a piece of paper cut to the exact size of a full card, and proceeded to draw in the right half of the card. (At least, what I imagined the right half of the card to look like, since I didn’t have a picture of the whole card to work from.) And in it went with the rest of my collection, where it stayed for many years after that.